I was playing BF3 online and suddenly my game crashes. It says to due some communication error with some punk buster file. System kinda becomes laggy then. couldnt rejoin a game as BF3 would open but would be unresponsive.

So i try to restart the pc, it takes forever to shut down, so i hit the restart button. But after that, it seems to freeze on the boot screen. takes 2 mins to get past it and on to the login screen. then i login, but a black screen for 5 mins. seems like its reloading the user profile for the first time on the system but all my destop icons were there when i finally got there.

My network icon had the blue circle around it like it was loading. but internet was working fine. apps would open but be unresponsive.

I have win 8 installed too on the same pc on dual boot and that works fine.

windows 8 works fine, so we can rule out; cpu,gpu,ram,power supply,motherboard

what are we left with? hard drive. looks like your HDD just bit the bullet. classic symptoms of bad sectors. battlefield died with a file error, laggy performance(disk trying to read files),long loading,weird errors like the login thing. I've seen this too many times.

To be sure, do a thorough scan on that partition,and when you find the bad sectors,time to replace the drive.